RETROSPECTIVES HIS SPECIALTY : HERO WORSHIP PAYS FOR COMEDY BUFF

When the producers of tonight’s “George Burns 90th Birthday Special” (8 p.m., Channels 2 and 8) needed assistance locating vintage footage of the comedian, they turned to a seemingly unlikely source--a 26-year-old.

However, Robert Weide is hardly representative of his age group. While his peers grew up idolizing rock stars or sports figures, Weide worshiped comedians who were in their prime before he was even born.

To date, Weide has parlayed his particular hero worship into two highly successful retrospectives--a PBS special on the Marx Brothers and an HBO special on the history of stand-up comics.

In the process, he has become Hollywood’s de facto expert on vintage comedy clips.

“So far I’ve been fortunate; every project I’ve done has been something I’ve personally been interested in. It’s not just for the bucks,” Weide said the other day during an interview at his tiny Whyaduck Productions’ Beverly Hills office suite.

In the case of the Burns special, Weide’s biggest payoff was spending a morning with the comedian.

“I’ve long admired Burns,” he said. “But usually when you meet someone that you’ve long admired, you’re setting yourself up for a disappointment. But meeting George Burns was everything you’d want meeting him to be. He has lost nothing upstairs.”

Weide joked that, “I always thought, ‘Well, they must prop him up at the last minute and shoot him full of steroids and just pray that he doesn’t slip up.’

“But there was none of that. In some ways he was more lucid and funnier and charming than I’d ever perceived him to be. We told vaudeville stories back and forth, and to some degree he treated me like an equal. I think he was sort of amazed that this kid could keep up.”

Weide has had plenty of practice “keeping up,” ever since he saw his first Marx Brothers movie (“Duck Soup”) in junior high school.

“The Marx Brothers were really my first loves in film. They were the ones who inspired me to seek out a living in the area of film,” he recalled.

At 19, Weide had already petitioned the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for a grant to produce a retrospective on the comedy team while he continued his efforts to be admitted to the USC film school.

“I’m very proud to say that I am a three-time USC film school reject (two more than Steven Spielberg),” he joked. “The punch line is now I am a guest speaker there each semester.”

His academic ambitions thwarted, Weide found out through a friend that Charles Joffe and Jack Rollins, Woody Allen’s producers, were looking for a runner. He applied and was hired on the spot.

Although his duties were basically those of an errand boy, Weide said he had “great fun. They (Rollins and Joffe) had the Mount Rushmore of comedy under management. While I was there I met Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Robin Williams, David Letterman and Dick Cavett.”

When Rollins and Joffe found out about Weide’s efforts to put together the Marx Brothers retrospective, they gave him much-needed assistance in procuring necessary film clips from studios.

“Getting clips from Universal and MGM was impossible,” Weide recalled. “Those studios basically hired people to answer the phone and say ‘go away’ when people called with requests like mine. Jack cut through all of that with one phone call.”

Weide’s production, “The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell,” finally aired on public television in 1982 and remains the 22nd highest-rated show in PBS history.

Weide returned to work for Rollins and Joffe, this time as their head of development.

Shortly thereafter, he sold a show to HBO on stand-up comics and gave up his developmental duties to direct the production. It, too, was considered a success.

One might think it would be only a matter of time before Weide would be compiling such shows for network television. Outside of lending assistance to other specials, however, Weide has not taken that path, expressing disdain for the networks’ “blooper” shows.

Currently he is putting the final touches on a W. C. Fields special that will be broadcast on PBS this spring. “The next project I want to do is a three-part special on Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory. Would any network touch that?”

Obtaining the clippings for each project, Weide maintained, is the easiest part of his job. “There’s very little mystery to it; it just comes from being a fan and seeking it out on my own,” he said. “You just need a basic working knowledge.”

On the Burns special, for example, Weide said that he “checked filmographies to start, but in many cases ownership had changed hands so I had to track it down. I finally found a majority of them with a private collector in New York.

“It was gratifying to see the audience respond so well to the Burns clips,” he added, referring to the taping last week at the Beverly Theatre. “In the age of MTV quick cuts, it was amazing to watch one segment which featured George and Gracie Allen dancing with Fred Astaire that was all one take--there were no stunt dancers spliced in.”

Weide acknowledged that he faces the danger of becoming typecast only as a “nostalgia” film maker. “I don’t see myself as strictly a clip show or documentary producer,” he maintained.

“My vision encompasses more than that. It’s just the way I’ve been able to make a living up until now. There are still a couple more people I want to do, then I’d like to break out and get into feature films.

“I think part of the reason that I’ve done as much hustling as I’ve done at this age is that I’m acutely aware of the fact that we get old and then we’re gone.

“It’s really driven home when you look at this material and see that you can be Groucho Marx and still end up an old guy in the hospital with tubes up your nose. On some subliminal level that has driven me to hurry up and get it all down.”